The Puffer Forum

I'm sorry to go completely off topic but those pictures kinda remind me of Lord Woo Fak Fak from Banjo Tooie (if anyone has played taht game)
On Topic: Praziquantel should work in place of flubenol

ya i will do that. just set up a 50 gallon rubbermaid for him. hopefully a vet can help

The vet may not know much about fish diseases but s/he shoudl be able to tell the difference between a worm & bacteria under a microscope. Enough to know to give you a deworming med or for you to go out & get the other option PQ offered for bacterial infection. You should probably treat for both if it is a parasite though, as there will be open sores where the parasite has attacked.

Since I moved him to the rubbermaid and started treating his water with Pimafix and Melafix it seems like he has been much more active. I called many local vets today and none work with fish so i can't really get the medication.
I can indeed get penicillin and the de-wormer medication through our supplier ROYAL. thanks again for the help and will keep everyone updated

Like I said, you do not need a fish vet. You just want the vet to look at a scraping under a microscope & ID the scraping as a parasite of bacteria. Then Puffer Queen can tell you what to do next. The vet should have deworming meds available.

Any pet store that deals in aquarium products should have some basic deworming meds and antibiotics in stock.

ya i have the meds. but i have called 10 vet offices today and all of them told me that they won't look at a scraping because they won't even know what they are looking at....they are absolutely no help!

That's terrible! I would think it should be simple to tell a worm from a bacteria. Any vet schools at a nearby college?

If you're going to go the college route, you might as well look around at local universities/colleges to see if there are any ichthyologists there, or if there are some profs or grad students doing any research on fish diseases. Or even parasitologists might be able to help you out with identifying a scraping.

ya i attend the University Of South Florida. tomorrow i really don't have anything going on so i will call around and see what they can do. whatever he has does not really seem to bother him. he isn't scratching or anything. it just looks NASTY!

Poor fella! Maybe someone studying marine biology?

I don't have any experience with SW, so I don't know how much you can transfer of knowledge about illnesses from FW fishes. But this thread here, have some interesting pics. I'm sorry the text is in Norwegian, but this is the livoneca case I mentioned earlier. And there's a pic of a very, very ill discus, with some of the same symptoms. Believe it or not, that discus made it through! If I remember it right, it was either Flubenol or PraziPro that made it for that discus. And it was Flubenol, Esha 2000 and another med she never named that cured those corys.

it is in Norwegian. I looked around, but for lack of knowing that language, couldn't find a language button. can you look and see if there is on and tell us? cause I'm sure you know, but lots of sites have it so you can change the language...

... I wish I could just learn Norwegian. then I could also read your paper.

btw, almost all other languages can read and write English very well. why is that?

No, there's no button to change the language, I'm sorry. I just wanted to show the pics, so you can compare with the symptoms in this thread. As I said, the conclusion of this cory problem was that it was probably livoneca (an isopod, like it's suggested earlier in this thread too). The reason why I know this case very well, is that I also bought corys from the same delivery, and got some of the same symptoms as well (except the white spots - they seemed to come later on). But after a cure with Flubenol and Esha Hexamita (which contains the same as Esha 2000 plus something to help on flagellates), I haven't seen anything on those corys again. Neither has the other cory owner. So it seems like Flubenol or PraziPro does help on this problem. But I still don't know whether this is possible to transfer to SW problems. I just see the likeness.

ok. they do look similar to me too. I'd treat with Flubenol or PraziPro like Troender said if you can't find anyone to help. but do check around first because it's SW and not FW...